Monday, 23 January 2012

Exploring Linden Realms

Out of the blue at the very beginning of December
(apparently it was available to premium users previously, but where Linden
announced this I have no clue), came a potential new paint job for Second Life®. Linden’s latest idea, ‘Linden Realms’, is “the
Lab's first-ever game prototype… dodge rock monsters and fierce fireballs as
you cross deadly, toxic rivers to complete quests and cash in your crystals for
Linden Dollars.”What’s notable is that
(at the time of writing, at least) this venture is apparently so significant to
LL that the Linden Realms logo currently displays on the SL home page with
equal prominence to the regular SL logo, and over a full page Linden Realms poster.The newcomer to www.secondlife.com is now
shown our metaverse as consisting of cartoon style fairies, rocks and evergreens.At the moment, this is the very first thing
they see.Not wanting to be part of that
crowd that unleashes the hounds of blogosphere fury every time Linden have the
audacity to do something to try to grow their business, however, I decided to
give Linden Realms a go.

The first couple of tries met with failure when I tried to follow
links from the ‘Showcase’ section of inworld search on Imprudence: these
claimed to be to Linden Realms but one led to a bog standard welcome hub and
the other to an island somewhere with a red brick lighthouse and a large group
of rather confused looking avatars.The
third attempt was via the Destinations Guide on the web site and got me to the
starting point, ‘Portal Park 1’, okay; but that was when I realised from the
odd collection of spheres and cylinders around me that I obviously needed a
mesh-enabled viewer.Linden had
neglected to mention this, presumably because this whole experience is very
clearly aimed at new residents who won’t yet have learned about the existence
of third party viewers, especially those not yet supporting mesh.

Attempt number four, then – this time in Firestorm – got me
viewing finally Portal Park 1 and its eight gates to the first gaming area correctly.A note about the gates – and I think it’s
worth spending a moment on this, since they’re the first point of contact
avatars actually have with ‘the game’: they’re numbered in roman numerals in
the following sequence: 5, 7, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.Unless I’m missing something blindingly obvious,
it strikes me that this sequence is frankly bonkers and likely to confuse the
hell out of newbies.As an experienced
SL user, I spent nearly ten minutes camming around (newbies wouldn’t have yet
mastered this skill) trying to work out if these were different levels and I’d
somehow managed to miss levels one and two.In fact, each gate leads to an identical version of the game situated on
different islands (each island consisting of eleven sims) towards the
north-east of the grid and it doesn’t actually matter which of them you choose.None of this was obvious to the large
collection of avatars stuck in a big heap of uncertainty in the centre of the
Portal Park, many of whom had disappeared by the time I decided to throw
caution to the wind and take my chances on entrance number three – and not by
walking through one of the gates.

And so to the first realm itself.Gameplay can pretty much be summarised as
follows: your guide – Tyrah – directs you from one part of the island to
another and you have to avoid such obstacles as rock monsters, fire balls,
toxic water and rock falls to get there.Along the way, you can collect different coloured crystals which can be
traded at ‘The Portal Workshop’ in quantities of 50 for Linden Dollars (50 red
earned me L$1, 50 yellow earned me L$2 and 50 orange earned me L$5; hardly a
fortune, but for damned sure more lucrative and more entertaining than
camping).All these things are achieved
via some rather slick technology.‘Death’ occurs on physical contact with beast/fireball/toxic water/falling
boulder, automatically sending you via teleport to the nearest ‘resurrection
circle’.Similarly, crystals are
collected simply by walking into them (they disintegrate on touch) and the
quantity you have of each colour is recorded in a HUD which loads automatically on entry into the game
area.The HUD – which is also where you
receive your instructions from Tyrah – is a point of interest for a number of
reasons.First of all, it loads without
asking permission.Second, it doesn’t
get stored in your inventory.Third, if
you take it off you get automatically teleported out of the game.Fourth, when you return to the game after
leaving – minutes, hours or days later (even if you’ve removed the HUD in the
interim) – your crystal levels and game status are preserved.Whatever your orientation towards crystal
collecting might be, this technology has interesting potential for use
elsewhere on the grid.

Each ‘quest’ is essentially a challenge to find/reach a
particular point on the island without dying too many times.Tyrah asks you to go check out destination A;
you finally find it; Tyrah tells you, “Oh, so X is happening there.Now I want you to check out what’s happening
at destination B”. And so on.Avoiding
the rock monsters is initially frustratingly difficult, but gets easier once
you realise you can outrun them if you, well, run.The rock falls also finished me off fairly
consistently until the point where I abandoned my strategy of basically legging
it through the caves and instead used a stop-start approach to the
problem.I spent a few hours of a
Saturday afternoon playing and got sent from the Base Camp to The Shattered
Cavern to Banshee’s Peak to Tyrah’s peak and then to a toxic pool in the centre
of Devil’s Canyon.Along the way, I also
visited the Sunspire Tower and its satellite platforms, where I experienced
being burned up “by the outer layers of an expanding star” (amazingly, the
island was not even singed by this) and later “atomised by a broken
portal”.The toxic pool in the centre of
Devil’s Canyon was, alas, where I finally abandoned Linden Realms, since
whatever it was that was meant to happen there didn’t and twenty minutes of
walking around it in circles (and even managing to jump my way onto the tiny
island in the middle which I felt had to
be the intended destination) led me eventually to conclude there were
better things to be occupying myself with on a weekend.

If all this sounds rather cynical, you might be surprised to
learn that I actually quite enjoyed Linden Realms.Simplistic as it is, the gameplay had an
appeal to it that reminded me of the eight bit dodge-this-and-collect-that
computer games of my teenage years.It’s
simple, but it’s fun.And the scenery –
whilst admittedly a little like something you’d expect to see in a Disney movie
for under tens – was well designed, colourful and bold.The island had a definite atmosphere. The
experience is immersive. Perhaps most
amazingly of all, but also most crucial of all for any sort of online game
experience – there was practically no lag whatsoever.

I say I gave up on Linden Realms, however I do intend to
return to that toxic pool and work out what it is that’s supposed to happen
there.I also want to visit the other
realms I’ve since discovered are accessible from separate Portal Parks (check
the destination guide).Is this the
start of a new direction to my SL?Of
course it’s not; it’s just an interesting distraction.As a start to someone’s SL, however, I think this idea has possibility.It’s hardly a net that’s going to catch
everyone’s interests; nonetheless this represents an approach to one of the
most difficult challenges facing SL recruitment: getting new residents immersed
in the world before they tire of its uncertainty.A newbie that follows the pointers to Linden
Realms as their first SL experience will actually have something structured to do instead of all that hanging around
at the infohub, waiting for something to make sense (or, at least, for the guy
with the large penis attachment to go away).The awarding of Linden Dollars is an especially cunning strategy,
particularly since – at the Portal Workshop where you trade your crystals in –
you’re given a direct link to the Marketplace website, preloaded with a search
for items costing between two and twenty Lindens.This is a great way of getting people
interested in their avatar’s appearance whilst caught up in the game… and might
even have worked as a strategy were there an area in the workshop for rezzing
the boxes when they get delivered.

Which brings me back to my earlier grumbles.As an idea, Linden Realms has potential.But it needs significant polish if it’s going
to succeed in its newbie attracting objectives; at the moment there’s still too
much about it that’s just confusing.In
fairness, it’s a new strategy and should be given time to mature, but a lot of
these gripes are relatively easy fixes and just require a little newbie
empathy.There’s technology here that
I’m looking forward to seeing exploited by SL’s immensely creative
community.And it’s a good showcase for
mesh.Last of all, I can’t help but
wonder – particularly given the prominence that the venture’s been given on the
SL website – if this is the first step in an SL ‘rebranding’ that I’ve seen
suggested in a couple of blogs.A year
from now, will we still be visiting ‘Second Life’, that world without a proper
name that suggests we can’t cope with our existing life?Or will we be visiting just ‘Linden’?